Picasso's verbal artistry

Pablo Picasso was, we know, the most influential artist of the 20th century. His innovations in perspective and technique dazzled (and sometimes baffled) the art world for decades, while paving the way for many of the important artistic movements of the last century. What we're inclined to overlook, though, is that Picasso was also a poet. Now it's not unusual for artists to work in mediums outside their own. What makes Picasso's experiment in poetry different, however, is the skill he displayed. In fact, it has been argued that if Picasso had never picked up paintbrush he would today still be remembered as a major Spanish poet.

Picasso's interest in poetry comes as no surprise to those familiar with his life. From his earliest days in Paris, he liked to surround himself with poets, including luminaries such as Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, and Jean Cocteau. Through these relationships Picasso was always highly aware of what was going on in contemporary European poetry. It wasn't until he was 54, though, contending with impasses in his visual art and personal life, that Picasso finally tried his hand at poetry himself. The result was a torrent of words that continued for nearly 25 years.

The work, unsurprisingly, owes a great deal to his training as painter, in that he eschews the typical musical foundation of verse (Picasso never care much for music) and treats his words more like brushstrokes. Additionally, taking cues from his own cubist breakthroughs and surrealist notions a la Breton, he generally throws traditional notions of grammar, structure, and punctuation out the window, allowing him to create crowded, often daunting collages of images, ideas, and emotions, as exemplified by the following translated excerpts:

… the street be full of starsand the prisoners eat dovesand the doves eat cheeseand the cheese eat wordsand the words eat bridgesand the bridges eat looksand the looks eat cups full of kisses in the orchatathat hides all with its wingsthe butterfly the nightin café last summerin Barcelona

… outsized flood of doves released drunk on the cutting festoons of prisms fixed to the bells decomposing with its thousandlit candles the green flocks of wool illuminated by the gentle acrobatics ofthe lanterns hanging from each arc string and the definitive dawn

Like his paintings, Picasso's poems are not always easy to interpret. Some, frankly, are quite impenetrable. However, the relentless onslaught of his words is almost always invigorating, especially in their breathless demolition of traditional poetic forms. In fact, for poetry fans feeling themselves bogged down in the portentous or just plain overwrought, Picasso's childlike, wildly flung wordscapes might be a perfect antidote.

Picasso wrote in both Spanish and French, but sadly English translations of Picasso's poetry are not abundant. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems, released in 2004, is a handsome volume that collects a large portion of Picasso's writing and is highly recommended. Beyond this, his work appears in a number of anthologies, including Penguin's widely available Surrealist Poetry in English. Also worth searching out is Hunk of Skin, an out-of-print collection published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights in 1968 that is available in many used venues, often at a fairly reasonable price.

When all is said and done Pablo Picasso is obviously a visual artist first and a poet second. Still his work rises far above the typical dabblings that usually emerge from an artist trying to cross into another form of expression. Whether or not Picasso should be ranked as a "major Spanish poet", as many of his literary supporters claim, he certainly is an interesting writer who cannot and should not be easily dismissed.